Google updates mobile search

Internet search engine giant Google has announced it has brought out improvements surrounding searching on mobile phones, with a focus on minimising text entry for better results.

Google has seen searching on handsets increase over the past two years, to reach five times that of beforehand; this is a rate close to that of the early days of desktop Google search.

The new features surround making it easier to generally search and also for nearby places too, the later of which is a common searched function on mobile devices.

Google has added new shortcuts for the most frequently searched categories, with icons at the base of the mobile Google homepage. These shortcuts are the likes of restaurants, coffee shops and bars. ‘More’ opens up more selections, from categories such as like shopping, cash points, petrol stations and all without entering any text.

The second feature also makes it easier to perform more complicated searches, by building up longer queries and in a simple way too.

Google has now added suggested phrases to the search box, where these are used to build up searched for items piece by piece.

These new mobile features are now available on Android ‘Froyo’ 2.2 and above, in addition to iOS in version 4.0 onwards.

Check out the two videos below from Google, which highlight these new abilities.